On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would provide aid to states’ budgets and is predicted to save thousands of teaching jobs. President Obama signed the bill into law as well, providing relief to state budgets that are facing in all over $120 billion in shortfalls for the upcoming fiscal year.

Craig:

I feel very conflicted by this bill. I understand and can see why Congress wants to pass aid to the sates. However, at what cost? As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge budget hawk. I think we need to cut more, find new revenue sources, and even change the structure of how we tax our citizens. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Quayle, the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle is running for Congress in Arizona. He recently released an advertisement calling President Obama the “worst president in history.” You can watch the ad here . This ad is the perfect example as to why I get so frustrated with Washington D.C. politics.

Our national debt for the first 9 months of our fiscal year was over $1 trillion for the first time. It was the quickest time that our countries has reached a $1 trillion deficit. Here is the main article from Yahoo News, that points out what $1,000,000,000,000 buys.

This week, there has been a media firestorm regarding the 90,000 documents that were previously marked “Classified.” They were leaked via the Internet and WikiLeaks.

Like many things, my thoughts are mixed on this. I totally understand and agree with national security. I read what I thought was a New York Times article about three weeks ago that said there were over 850,000 people in the United States with Top Secret Security Clearances. That’s nearly one in every 300 Americans. That’s a lot of people.

Our security should be one of our top priorities, but I would be interested in learning of a new approach of streamlining to know who has what types of security clearances. This would be a facinating report, and I hope that it’s already done and in the hands of the top Administration Officials.

I would like to hope though, in any leak of this kind, that there are serious considerations for the safety of those that could be in harms way if information is released. However, I think that as a country and nation, when things are declassified in a timely manner as they should (if it’s deemed safe) that we can learn from possible mistakes or missteps. I think this is an important piece of American history and the uniqueness of our political system.

I haven’t looked through, and honestly have no desire to go through the leaked documents. However, I hope that they were released with good intentions. Unfortunately though, why our security is so vulnerable is because of the amount of knowledge that one person possibly possesses, and if they wanted to use that information for harm, it could be done. Time, and the news media will tell us how “explosive” these documents are, and I hope the government is honest if they tell us that this leak has the potential to harm Americans at home and abroad.

I’m going to be moving on thin ice with this post. However, I feel that I must comment on the forced resignation and then reneging and apologizing to Shirley Sherrod.

She was an official in the Department of Agriculture. She spoke at a NAACP convention and a clip of her speech was released late last week. She was later forced to resign based on her statements, where she recalled a scenario where she didn’t want to help out a poor farmer because he was white. What isn’t shown is her followup statements where she said that she helped him and she realized there were essentially two types of people: those who were needy and those who weren’t.

Next week, President Obama will be signing into law the Financial Reform package that was passed after weeks of negotiations in order to get past the filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate. This is what the Panorama tackles this week.

Two polls out this week have shown Americans are losing faith in the Obama administration. On Tuesday, the ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that nearly 60% of Americans “lack faith” in President Obama. 58% of respondents said they had “just some” or “none” confidence in Obama to make the right decision for America’s future.

Time Magazine just published their latest poll, showing that 49% of respondents approve of Obama’s performance while 45% disapprove. 56% of respondents said that the U.S. is on the wrong track. Read the rest of this entry »